the Chinese Academy of Governance. Such centers spearhead domestic philosophical debates and provide the underpinnings for constitutional changes, legal initiatives, and broad policy directions like five-year plans and national directives. Within Chinese think tanks, analysis of China’s environmental problems in the context of achieving ecological civilization often focuses on the negative influence of interest groups and capital, on the unhealthy “worship” of economic growth and development, and on the risks of an overly anthropocentric worldview (Z. Wang et al. 2014). In recent years, the discursive appeal of the phrase has enabled Chinese top leaders to institute governance reforms and reorganization and to promote technological innovations for environmental protection.
Alongside China’s domestic efforts, international forums and publications laud China’s newly articulated guiding philosophy. The world’s environmental advocates have expressed admiration and even envy that ecological considerations have received such high levels of official endorsement. Ecological civilization is widely interpreted as China’s effort to resolve tensions between environmental protection and economic development through concrete initiatives such as renewable energy promotion, carbon reduction, and reforestation. The phrase has become a focus of international optimism that China may be offering the world a visionary set of guiding principles, a sort of “sustainable development with Chinese characteristics” that both preserves China’s distinctive traditions and governance system and confronts the problem of capitalist overexploitation of global resources (Zinda et al. 2018). Some have speculated that ecological civilization embodies “the potential for a more assertive and confident China to assume a stronger leadership role in global environmental debates” (Geall and Ely 2018). Excitement around China’s prominent adoption of the concept has sparked conferences sponsored by the Yale School of Forestry and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting (Sawyer 2015). Typical scholarly work includes such titles as Barbara Finamore’s Will China Save the Planet? (2018), Arran Gare’s The Philosophical Foundations of Ecological Civilization: A Manifesto for the Future (2016), and Joanna Lewis’s Green Innovation in China: China’s Wind Power Industry and the Global Transition to a Low-Carbon Economy (2013). Ecological civilization thus figures both as China’s self-proclaimed solution for a troubled planet and as a potential beacon of hope for some international observers.
A Global Call to Action
At least some of this international scrutiny must be traced to an awakening to the crisis of the Anthropocene, the idea that the outsized human impact on global ecosystems has created an entirely new geologic epoch unlike anything in the planet’s long history. From this perspective, our planet is on the brink of becoming unlivable. Atmospheric scientists from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict that climate change will be more severe than even some pessimists anticipated; activists are calling for an immediate end to fossil fuel extraction and use in order to avert catastrophe. A similarly authoritative UN panel, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, sees a biodiversity emergency with more than one million species on the brink of extinction. With his “Half Earth” call to action, biologist E. O. Wilson argues that no less than 50 percent of the earth’s land and sea must be protected from development. Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, who has become a voice for the younger generation’s rage, denounces her elders at climate change conferences and demands to know why they have failed to act on the “existential crisis” that threatens humanity. Complicated and interconnected environmental challenges comprise what philosopher Stephen Gardiner (2011) calls “a perfect moral storm” confronting humanity. At a deep ethical level, our existing political, scientific, and social institutions are ill-prepared for the current ecological crisis.
For many scholars and activists, the urgency and gravity of the planetary situation justify decisive state interventions. Authoritarian environmentalism – the use of authoritarian methods to accomplish environmental goals – has a particular appeal at this historical moment. At a time when liberal democratic states repeatedly fail to address environmental problems, it is tempting to feel that draconian measures are needed, or at least worthy of serious consideration. Authoritarian environmentalism seems like a logical alternative to messy, gridlock-prone democracies that require unacceptable compromises with special interest groups. In autocracies, by contrast, policies that in democracies are subject to drawn-out political debates have been instituted almost overnight. In 2018, for example, Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte ordered a six-month closure of the tourism-dependent island of Boracay for its failure to meet environmental standards. During the rehabilitation period, hundreds of hotels and restaurants were shut down for environmental violations and the island’s shoreline easement zone was fully restored. In stark contrast to environmental inaction in liberal democracies, illiberal political regimes have often demonstrated impressive decisiveness in combating environmental problems, from bans on plastics to mandated increases in renewable energy use.
In that context, enter China, which has one of the world’s longest-lasting authoritarian governance systems and also one of the most explicit commitments to environmental protection. This is despite its well-deserved reputation for being one of the smoggiest places on the planet. China exemplifies a model of state-led, authoritarian environmentalism which concentrates political, economic, and discursive power within the parameters of the state under the centralized leadership of the Communist Party. Rather than sharing and balancing environmental tasks with independent scientists, entrepreneurs, and citizens’ groups, the state aims to monopolize the production of environmental knowledge and policies, the innovation of environmental technologies and their deployment, and the implementation and practice of environmental protection.
State-led environmentalism is accomplished through concrete mechanisms: centralized and targeted disbursement of research funding, channeling of industrial subsidies and support for state-owned enterprises, and guided media programming about the environment that is censored if it challenges state authority. Environmental NGOs and scientists are forced to cooperate with the state if they wish to survive, playing a delicate game of testing boundaries and carefully monitoring the prevailing political winds. By simultaneously expanding the regulatory scope of the state to encompass a growing range of environmental issues and co-opting non-state actors into the state’s environmental agenda, the Chinese state goes green.
China seems, on the face of it, to embody hope for a radically new approach to governing the planet, and given the limited time we have left to slow the pace of climate change and protect more than a million species from extinction, we need to consider whether a “green” authoritarian China can show us the way. In The Collapse of Western Civilization, a semi-fictional narrative of a post-apocalypse world of climate collapse, historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway describe the rise of a “Second People’s Republic of China” because of the supposedly superior model of state-led environmentalism that China practices. They conjecture that, from the perspective of an apocalypse survivor looking back, “China’s ability to weather disastrous climate change vindicated the necessity of centralized government … inspiring similar structures in other, reformulated nations” (Oreskes and Conway 2014, p. 52).
The imagined scenario is not without basis. China’s clean energy revolution has led some observers to view China’s approach as “developmental environmentalism” – industrial development of the sustainability sector that follows national priorities dictated by the state (Kim et al. 2019). This concept draws from the extensive scholarly literature on the East Asian “miracle” of economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s. The secret recipe, many have argued, was the East Asian “developmental state” that played a central role in shaping and implementing national industrial priorities. China’s success in green technologies is also due to favorable state policies. However, as we will see in the examples and cases presented in this book, the developmental environmentalism framework is insufficient to explain China’s environmental ambitions, which encompass many aspects of economic, political, and social life beyond clean technology.
As we look more closely, we see that China’s track record of environmental success has often been accomplished through top-down, non-consultative coercive measures at the cost of citizen rights and livelihoods. China’s state-led environmental action